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Drive

Starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan

Ryan Gosling also stars in Drive, a tough, stylish thriller that deservedly won Nicolas Winding Refn the best director gong at the Cannes Film Festival.
Gosling gives a laconic, sexy, quietly charming performance evocative of Steve McQueen, as a Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver.
Like all the best anti-heroes, he operates according to his own moral code, and can’t resist a pretty face, especially when it belongs to girl-next-door Carey Mulligan. And, like Alan Ladd in Shane, he enjoys becoming a surrogate father-figure to her son.
The talented British screenwriter Hossein Amini, criminally under-used in movies since his Oscar-nominated adaptation of The Wings Of The Dove, has written a tight, enjoyably twisty screenplay based on James Sallis’s novella.
There’s enough existential angst to please lovers of European art-house cinema, but it turns extremely bloody and action-packed towards the end, as the driver steers into a heap of trouble with a seedy Hollywood producer (Albert Brooks), a Jewish gangster (Ron Perlman) and a busty, red-haired femme fatale (Christina Hendricks — who else?).
The style is a skilful blending of stealth and shocks — reminiscent of Walter Hill between 1978 and 1982, when he was making films such as The Driver, Southern Comfort and 48 Hrs.
The car chases are inventive, and the sexual chemistry between Gosling and Mulligan beautifully understated.
One action set-piece in a lift is a shocker (in a good way), and the film has the courage of its noir-ish convictions.
Drive may be too slow and arty to set the multiplex box offices on fire, but it deserves to become a cult classic.
Ryan Gosling looked a fine actor when he made his first movies — The Believer, Murder By Numbers and The Notebook — and received an Oscar nomination for the little-seen Half Nelson.
This week’s two films, in which he shows a charm commensurate with his ability, deserve to propel him on to the Hollywood A-list.
Rating, 4 out of 5 Stars
Courtesy, Chris Tookey, Daily Mail (UK)
Official Trailer